LONDON 3 July 2012: Blue Lucy Media (BLM) has announced the full release of its “BLM Flexicart Service” module, which provides for full Sony Flexicart control to facilitate bulk, unattended ingest.

BLM CEO Julian Wright said, “Operational expenditures are one of the hidden costs of tape archive digitisation. VT operations, such as reviewing tape content or simply changing cassettes, can require a small team to manage. BLM’s Flexicart Service module enables content owners to accomplish bulk, unattended, ingest of up to 70 tapes with a single VTR, or 40 tapes with four VTRs by maintaining full operational control of an attached Flexicart, including tape movements and inventory management.”

BLM’s “Miura Acquisition Client” has also been updated to manage the enhanced Flexicart management capability. Acquisition will now accept in-house, third-party or Blue Lucy Asset Manager (BLAM) ingest schedules, which detail the cassette-tapes and the contents of each tape, usually described by time-code delineated segments.

An ingest schedule is matched against tapes in the Flexicart. Miura Acquisition then works through the tapes using the Flexicart Service for cart/robot tape operations and the BLM Ingest Service for ingest/file write operations. The unattended process runs until digitisation is complete, allowing more than 100 hours of content to be ingested without operational intervention or attendance.

In combination with BLM’s “Tailor Service” the Flexicart Service module provides content owners with a more efficient workflow alternative for bulk archive content digitisation. Rather than operators reviewing tapes to select the desired portions to ingest using a VTR, the tape content can be ‘blindly’ ingested in its entirety, with review and sub-clipping taking place in the file domain. By using a frame-accurate browse copy of the material (created as standard by the BLM Ingest Service) content review can take place at a desktop, or remotely if required. Users can select portions of a file that are to be preserved and BLM’s Tailor Service will create a physical, lossless, sub-clip, which means there is no degradation in quality between the master clip and the sub-clip derivative. Until now such a workflow required a lossy transcode or baseband renderer, which was far from ideal.

As with all BLM service products there is no requirement for any proprietary hardware other than the Flexicart interface module supplied by BLM. The BLM Flexicart Service module has been developed in conjunction with Red Bee Media, one of the world’s leading media management companies providing multi-platform technology and creative solutions to broadcasters, content rights holders, platform operators and brand owners.

About Blue Lucy Media: Blue Lucy Media is a privately owned UK company based in London, operating globally through OEM partners and directly to end-customers through a network of value added resellers.